The Drinking Hand
by Jeffrey Greene
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Table of Contents parts: 1, 2, 3 |
part 2
Daniel learned that an arm without a hand has many uses: for overall balance, for lifting and pushing, to brace and steady objects for the infinitely varied and subtle articulations of a hand, to add its considerable strength to the whole. But a handless arm is a little like half a pair of scissors: useful for something, surely, just not for cutting paper or fabric.
Returning home after hours spent looking for work, he would take long walks in the afternoon or early evening. It got him out of the house and away from temptation, and it cleared his head. He kept trying to retrieve a piece of that night, but so far, none of his methods had worked. He tried thinking of nothing else — easy enough to do in his jobless state — and he tried avoiding the subject altogether, imagining that something might pop into his head. He attempted to relive every moment of the day in question, gently coaxing his memory up to and then beyond the point at which he blacked out. He even rented the movie The Hell With Heroes and watched it again, vainly hoping for some trigger to suggest what happened next.
He wrote down his dreams, some of which were almost intolerably vivid, feeling that anything as traumatic as what he’d experienced would be squirreled away somewhere in his unconscious mind, and must eventually begin to leak, like a pressurized gas, into his dreams and reveries.
But although some of these dreams were disturbing, he did not appear to suffer from the recurrent nightmares common to post-traumatic stress disorder, since it is the unbearable memory of the event itself, his doctor told him, rather than the injury, that haunts the patient. In Daniel’s case, whatever circumstances had led to his amputation were seemingly lost to him. Several weeks after the event, he was no closer to remembering what had happened than he had been in the hospital.
He had, however, in spite of his doubts about himself, managed to stay sober. He finally landed a job with a mortgage brokerage firm a month later, in May of 2003, which he strongly suspected was due less to his once-impressive résumé than a combination of a pressing need for warm bodies in the midst of a housing boom, and the belief on the part of his employers that his disability might inspire trust in military veterans shopping for a mortgage.
He called one of the detectives on the case, who told him that they still had no leads. The case remained open, the detective assured him, but he also advised him to put the event behind him. Though frustrated by the failure both of the police and his own memory, Daniel agreed with him. The mystery of that night would always haunt him, he knew, but lately he found himself caring less about who had done the deed and why than how he would face the rest of his life without a family, a left hand, and more tellingly, without liquor.
A signal moment in his recovery came on his fifth visit to his local A.A. chapter. He met an attractive woman a few years younger than himself, a veteran, she told the group, of the war in Iraq. She’d started drinking heavily during her second tour of duty, and didn’t slow down for more than a year after her honorable discharge. They had exchanged glances throughout the meeting, and afterward they began a conversation which continued at a coffee shop, and wasn’t concluded even after a long dinner at a nearby restaurant. She had taken him for a veteran, too, but he had told her his story, what little he knew of it, sparing himself nothing, and she had listened sympathetically.
Her name was Jan Whitcomb. He found in her a compelling quality of remoteness, by which he didn’t mean coldness or aloofness, but more as if her heart were a distant country that might welcome him if he decided to settle there, if he could only bear the hardship of the journey. As warm and open as she had seemed to him that first day, he sensed that she held a great deal in reserve, and that gaining her full trust would be a gradual process.
She, too, he could see, had been damaged by alcohol and violence, though in less obvious ways, and in the course of their quickly growing intimacy, it wasn’t lost on either of them how inauspicious such a union between two precariously sober alcoholics might seem to an outsider. At the time he saw her as nothing less than a gift from the sobriety gods, his first real chance to redeem himself after swearing off the booze and finding employment.
And his luck really had seemed to change. The housing bubble was still three years from its peak, and he had risen rapidly in the mortgage firm, becoming one of its busiest brokers. He bought a townhouse in Tyson’s Corner, and Jan, who had been renting a garage apartment in Falls Church, moved in with him.
He had by this time been fitted with a prosthetic, and had mastered its functions to the degree that he now considered himself in possession of one-and-a-half hands. The night she moved in, they celebrated with non-alcoholic sparkling wine, which they later agreed had been a mistake. The taste of even kickless champagne was too temptingly reminiscent of their recent, unshared pasts, and both knew that it in these heady times of seemingly limitless financial opportunity, nothing could be more natural than a well-stocked liquor cabinet.
They made a pact together, that absolute sobriety was the very floor of their relationship, and all temptations encountered during the course of the day, either singly or together, should be discussed and, if either one fell off the wagon, the other would be the first to know. A temporary lapse could be forgiven, her troubled, inward gaze seemed to say, but a lie, even one of omission, would be the end of things between them. In her tacit way, she had hinted that marriage was a possibility, but not in the near term, and that if he proposed too soon, he would be turned down.
Although they clearly needed each other, there was an unresolved tension lurking behind everything they did together. He couldn’t get over the feeling that she hadn’t been entirely forthcoming about her recent past, her family, her love life. She had a deft way of deflecting his questions, preferring to dwell, she would say, not on past misery but present happiness.
They socialized very little with other couples, behavior that one suspects is not uncommon among dry drunks rescued by A.A., who for a while at least, tend to see everyone who still drinks as an alcoholic in denial, eager to lure them back into the fold. The idea of having children seemed out of the question for several reasons, and they both worked long hours at their jobs, so their time together in the evening was jealously guarded.
One afternoon, an old friend of his, who’d been living on the west coast for the last five years, called unexpectedly, and Dan — as Jan preferred calling him — invited him to his new home. The friend brought a housewarming present, a gift-wrapped box, and asked them not to open it until after he’d left.
After getting over his initial shock at Dan’s prosthetic hand, they were able to relax and catch up on things. The friend was obviously charmed by Jan, though he also seemed surprised and a little offended not to be offered a drink. Without going into much detail, Dan explained his situation.
The friend, with whom he had killed many a bottle over the years, nodded understandingly at this, then congratulated him on his new life and, a short time later, left. The house-warming present, it turned out, was a fine, small-batch bourbon, its round, stubby bottle nestled inside a felt-lined wooden box, the shape of which had fooled him, familiar as he was with his friend’s past fondness for gifting liquor.
Holding the whisky away from him as he would a urine specimen, he told Jan that he would pour it down the sink immediately. She surprised him, however, by suggesting that they keep it in the cupboard as it was, both as a symbol of their sobriety and as an offering to their guests who drank. Not without misgivings, he did as she advised. In fact, they never opened it, and for the next year it gathered dust in the cabinet over the refrigerator.
The brokerage firm, in the meantime, was prospering, and he felt himself under increasing pressure to write mortgages, most, by the summer of 2005, of the subprime variety. He wasn’t the only broker there with the queasy feeling that things couldn’t go on as they were much longer, that housing prices had risen too high, too fast.
An increasing percentage of his customers were clearly people who had no business buying a home, and his conscience was bothering him. For the first time in two years he felt the old urge to have a drink, and then dutifully told Jan about it. She suggested they drive to a big-box building supply store and shop for some bookshelves she wanted to install.
While browsing through the massive, crowded aisles, they ran into Dan’s old landlord. He noticed that the man’s smile quickly changed to a look of guarded surprise, and he passed them without stopping, his cheerful greeting clearly forced. It was an awkward moment, for he realized that the man had recognized Jan, and she had pretended not to know him. She quickly moved on to the subject of shelves, and he didn’t ask for explanations.
The next day, he called the landlord from his office and asked him what the problem was. At first reluctantly, the man told him that Jan Whitcomb had been a former tenant in his complex and had abruptly left a month before Dan himself had, owing him two months’ rent. Not only that, he said, but she had trashed the apartment.
Shocked, Dan said that he never knew she had lived there and that he had never seen her. Because she lived on the other side of the complex, the man replied. Her neighbors had complained about her wild parties, the loud music, sounds of glass breaking, the “rough people” with whom she associated. He’d been relieved to see her go, willing to write off the unpaid rent in order to be rid of her.
Dan felt compelled to mention that she was a veteran of the war in Iraq, and had since gotten sober. He didn’t know anything about that, the landlord testily replied. In his experience, she was a veteran of nothing but getting loaded and making trouble.
Dan thanked him and hung up, offended but also disturbed by the man’s remarks. He called Jan at her job, and her boss said she had left early, complaining of illness. He called home, and he called her cell phone, both times getting voice mail.
It was after nine when he finally pulled into his driveway. The house, he knew at once, was empty. He found a brief, unsigned note on the kitchen table: “I’m so sorry, Dan. Please don’t look for me.” All the trappings of the house, the things they’d purchased together, were there, but her personal belongings were gone. Gone also, he discovered with a feeling as if he’d been kicked in the stomach, was the box of bourbon.
He looked for her at the A.A. meetings, but she never came back, nor did he ever run into her again. He took it hard, at first blaming her, then himself, but he didn’t really look for her, perhaps afraid of what he’d find if he probed too deeply.
Shortly afterward he heard that his ex-wife had remarried and managed the difficult feat of a transfer from the D.C. offices of the USDA to a branch office in Orlando, Florida. As it happened, he had just received an offer on his townhouse for much more than he had paid for it, so he decided to sell out and relocate to Tampa, where he could be reasonably close to his children and far from the haunts of Jan Whitcomb.
Copyright © 2022 by Jeffrey Greene
